Like many towns of its size, the eastern Ontario waterfront community of Gananoque – population approximately 5,100 year-round, considerably more during the summer – was facing aging IT systems, including a mission critical application that was about to lose support.
Enter Toronto-based Gold winner for the 2017 CDN Channel Elite Award for Best Enterprise Solution Zycom Technology Inc., which developed and implemented a hyper-converged platform-based IT solution that not only digitally transformed the town, but saved it 30 per cent in IT management fees alone.
Zycom’s solution included virtual physical servers that utilized on-premise cloud-ready platform Nutanix Xpress, a physical-to-virtual Microsoft Server, and a Veeam cloud-based Backup as a Service solution allowing for offsite recovery.
The result: Gananoque’s on-premise IT infrastructure can now integrate with the cloud, improving the performance of its Vadim application software and accelerating its database management.
And because Zycom’s hyper-converged platform was less expensive than traditional tier-3 virtual server architecture, the town was able to apply its remaining IT budget to other services, such as improving security and networking. With this new service offering the Town enjoys interruption free hypervisor and HCI platform upgrades with improved support.
The Town’s on-premise Exchange workforce solution was also migrated to the Office 365 cloud solution, improving user experience while also reducing Zycom’s managed service fees.
Zycom also improved the Town’s security with a managed WatchGuard perimeter solution while upgrading the WAN bandwidth, replaced its existing network switching infrastructure with HPE, and replaced its previous Wi-Fi services with Ruckus to improve user experience at Gananoque’s marina and other public facilities.
Naturally, the company continues to provide full IT management to support the new infrastructure and help services, which can now focus on real-time monitoring, management, problem resolution, and preventative maintenance.
Gananoque’s contract with Zycom gives it the expertise and capability needed to maintain its infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of hiring internal resources.
Richmond Hill, Ont.’s Compugen, a multiple Channel Elite Award winner over the years, won this year’s silver award for Best Enterprise Solution by providing a highly time-sensitive services to migrate users and upgrade infrastructure for a large entertainment company that was in the midst of acquiring a related business.
The client was looking for a technology partner with skill, speed, capability, agility, and experience, and were very happy with what they found in Compugen. Compugen’s role was to realize, according to a very short timeline, the capabilities of the merger to increase revenue and efficiency through the seamless onboarding of new staff, and new end user infrastructure, and to put in place new support mechanisms (service desk and network operating centre) for ongoing efficiency.
As the new arrangement becomes familiar to the customer, Compugen is continuing to support the business, and no business has been lost as a result of the transition.
Compugen’s reputation has been enhanced by its proven ability to deliver on a short timeline without excuses. The extraordinary success Compugen has had in delivering this transition has led to more opportunities in the same sector.
BRONZE: Softlanding Solutions
This year’s bronze for Best Enterprise Solution award winner Vancouver’s Softlanding Solutions provided a solution that allowed a major copper resource mining company to realize many benefits, including a reduction in staff time spent on infrastructure tickets and servicing, considerable savings from decommissioned equipment, and enhanced reporting.